1519 : A Journey to the End of Time

When Hernán Cortés met the Mayans, Aztecs and other cultures of the gulf coast of Mexico in 1519, it was the first extended contact between the peoples of continental America and Europe. The Spanish found cities larger and better run than any in Europe, and pyramids greater than Egypt's. The Aztecs believed time was running down and they lived in the final age of the world. Many Spaniards believed Christ's millennium was approaching, and that God's revelation of the Americas had opened the final act: the conversion of the remote races of the earth. After the Day of Judgement, God's experiment with man would be over. The laboratory, the physical world, would be destroyed. Both cultures were acting out the last days.

Halfway through researching this book, John Harrison had a scan which told him he would not live to write it; he was seeing out his own days. The Aztec people were concerned with the transitory nature of worldly things; some of their rulers were revered as much for their philosophical poetry as their conquests.

Following Cortés's route along the Mexican coast and across country to modern Mexico City, home of the Aztecs, Harrison creates a journey within journeys to the end of time. The book becomes a profound meditation on time, on mortality and self, from a modern master of travel writing.